This article was downloaded by: [179.176.132.

213]
On: 24 June 2015, At: 11:57
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered
office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Translation Studies
Publication details, including instructions for authors and
subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtrs20

Views of orality and the translation of

the Bible
a

Lourens de Vries
a

Department of Language, Literature and Communication, Vrije

Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Published online: 14 Jan 2015.

Click for updates

To cite this article: Lourens de Vries (2015) Views of orality and the translation of the Bible,
Translation Studies, 8:2, 141-155, DOI: 10.1080/14781700.2014.992463
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2014.992463

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the
Content) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,
our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to
the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,
and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content
should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources
of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,
proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or
howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising
out of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any
substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,
systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/termsand-conditions

Translation Studies, 2015

Vol. 8, No. 2, 141155, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14781700.2014.992463

Views of orality and the translation of the Bible

Lourens de Vries*

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Department of Language, Literature and Communication, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam,

The Netherlands
This article presents an overview of constructions of orality that played an
important role in the theory and practice of modern Bible translation. Three
distinct perspectives can be distinguished. First we have the constructions of
orality as articulated by Buber and Rosenzweig in the Interbellum period, a view
of orality embedded in ideologies and patterns of thinking of nineteenth-century
Germany. The second perspective focuses on universalist and dichotomous
constructions of orality, informed by mid-twentieth-century linguistics, anthropology and philology that strictly separated, isolated and contrasted oral and written
communication. The third perspective has roots in developments in late twentiethcentury biblical scholarship and linguistics. It rejects the universal dichotomies of
the preceding period as pseudo-universal and empirically false and emphasizes two
things, the interconnectedness of oral and written dimensions and the local nature
of oralwritten interfaces in different linguistic, cultural and historical conditions.
Keywords: orality; Bible translation; oralwritten interfaces; translation history;
oral versus literate cultures

The purpose of this article is to present an overview of theories and ideologies of

orality that play an important role in the theory and practice of modern Bible
translation (twentieth and twenty-first century). Translators of the Bible, including
those who are not inclined to theoretical reflection on their translation practices,
often use the term oral to explain what they are doing. They may call the Bible a
product of an oral culture and discern oral styles in biblical texts. They may view
some audiences, or even cultures as a whole, as predominantly oral, or see the
Hebrew and Greek texts of the biblical corpus as oral literature written down.
They may even try to capture the orality of the Bible in their translations. The
term oral has an innocent and technical ring to it. But notions of orality functioned
as a vehicle for a wide range of ideologies, theologies and philosophies in the history
of Bible translation. This implies that the terms oral and orality mean different
things to different scholars and this led some scholars to avoid the terms altogether
(Rodriquez 2014, 67). However, as with so many other scholarly terms, this
multiplicity of meaning is less problematic once the contexts in which scholars use
these terms are taken into consideration. This article aims to give an overview of the
perspectives, views and contexts that have informed the usage and meanings of the
terms oral and orality in the history of Bible translation. Many of these views of
orality were (and are) surprisingly immune to later insights and evidence from
*Email: l.j.de.vries@vu.nl
2015 Taylor & Francis

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

142

Lourens de Vries

biblical scholarship and linguistics. This explains why Bible translations of the
twenty-first century can be shown to reflect constructions of orality of the nineteenth
or early twentieth century.
Three main perspectives on orality and Bible translation may be distinguished
that can be chronologically ordered. The first perspective is early twentieth century
(Neo-)Romantic constructions of orality as articulated by Buber and Rosenzweig
(Gesprochenheit or spokenness of the Bible and its translation). These views of
Gesprochenheit were embedded in wider nineteenth-century ideologies and patterns
of thinking (de Vries 2012, 2014): for example, primacy of diachrony, expressive and
nationalistic theories of language centred around Sprachgeist, emphasis on roots as
translational units and on root meanings.
The second perspective focused on universalist dichotomous constructions of
orality (e.g. Ong 1982), informed by mid-twentieth-century linguistics, anthropology
and philology. The second perspective strictly separated, isolated and contrasted oral
and written communication (de Vries 2003). These dichotomies ascribed a range of
linguistic, cognitive and cultural properties to orality and literacy. Orality was
associated with a strong tendency towards paratactic, concrete, context-bound,
formulaic, repetitive and mnemonic discourse; literacy with a tendency towards
complex forms of embedded syntax, abstraction and logic, with non-redundant, nonmnemonic forms of discourse, not tied to the immediate context.
The third, most recent, perspective has roots in developments in late twentiethand early twenty-first-century biblical scholarship, ancient studies and linguistics. It
rejects the universal dichotomies of the preceding period as pseudo-universal and
empirically false. And it emphasizes two things: the interconnectedness of oral and
written dimensions (oralwritten interfaces) and the local nature of oralwritten
interfaces in different linguistic, cultural and historical conditions (e.g. Carr 2005;
de Vries 2012).
Of course, this overview deals with just three major perspectives on orality in the
field of Bible translation and does not pretend to cover the whole literature and
research on orality and Bible translation.

The first perspective: Gesprochenheit

Martin Buber (18781965) and Franz Rosenzweig (18861929), both born and
raised in Jewish families, collaborated on their German translation of the Hebrew
Bible, Die Schrift (Buber and Rosenzweig 1997).1 After the death of Rosenzweig in
1929, Buber went on to complete his last version between 1954 and 1962. The idea of
the Gesprochenheit or spokenness of the Hebrew Bible is the central theme of both
their theorizing about Bible translation and their translation practices in Die Schrift.
Buber, born in Austria, studied philosophy between 1897 and 1909, in Leipzig and
other places in Germany. It was in those years that he came in contact with the
philosophies of nineteenth-century Germany (Schmidt 1995; Askani 1997). Rosenzweig studied philosophy in Freiburg and wrote a dissertation on Hegel in 1908.
Buber and Rosenzweig did not only absorb German philosophies of the nineteenth
century in their younger years, but they kept interacting with contemporary German
philosophy: for example, with Interbellum philosophers, especially Heidegger
(Gordon 2003).

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

143

Four influences are important to understand Buber and Rosenzweig (de Vries
2014): first, Romantic views of translation; second, generally accepted linguistic
ideologies of nineteenth-century Germany; third, the philosophical climate of the
German Interbellum period; and fourth, the Jewish heritage of Buber and
Rosenzweig.
Van der Louw (2006, 14) discusses links between the German Romantic ideas on
language and translation of people like Schleiermacher and Herder on the one hand
and those of Buber and Rosenzweig on the other. There are continuities in the notion
of translation as deeply and directly felt experience of the individual otherness of the
original writer and of the individual otherness of his or her language, its unique
Sprachgeist [language-spirit]. In line with early nineteenth-century Romantic
translators, Buber and Rosenzweig have an expressive and psychological rather
than a representational theory of language. At the collective level language is viewed
as an horizon of understanding of a Volk, inseparable from the world view of its
speakers. At the level of the individual writer language is seen as inseparable from
the inner world of the writer that it expresses. The term Sprachgeist plays a key role
in the way Buber and Rosenzweig think about language, culture and translation
(Reichert 1996). To capture the fremdes Sprachgeist [foreign language-spirit] of
Hebrew grammar and the individual otherness of the foreign biblical writers they
forced the German language zu einer fremden nlichkeit2 [towards a foreign
likeness], combining neologistic German, invented on the spot (e.g. knigen,
darnahen and Nahung), with archaic and rare German words. For a more detailed
discussion of the relationship between Buber and Rosenzweig and the early
nineteenth-century Romantic turn in translation, see de Vries (2014).
The second influence of nineteenth-century Germany on Buber and Rosenzweig
are general ideas on language and linguistic ideologies of that period, especially the
primacy of diachrony and unity assumptions. Language was approached from a
diachronic perspective in nineteenth-century Germany. Comparative linguistics
reconstructed Ur languages from which modern languages had descended. Lexical
semantics was about Ur meanings of words as revealed by etymologies and not
about synchronic contextual meanings in various contexts of usage. This diachronic
take on language dominates the translation theory and practice of Buber and
Rosenzweig (de Vries 2014). Rosenzweig talks about the etymological Tiefsinn der
Worte [the deep meaning of words]. He employs the metaphor of a mineshaft into
which we have to descend to find the Ur meanings of recurrent Hebrew roots, using
German terms as the Wurzelschicht der Worte [the shaft of the root of words] (van
der Louw 2006, 4). An example of this etymologizing translation practice would be
how Buber and Rosenzweig in the Psalms render the Piel forms of , to deliver; to
rescue, with entschnren and losschnren, to unlace, to untie (of ropes), based on a
(contested) etymology (Botterweck and Ringgren 1980, 437): for example, in Psalm
6:5 and Psalm 60:7.
Buber and Rosenzweig understood the heritage of Schleiermacher, Hegel and
Herder in terms of their own times, the period between the two world wars in
Germany. The chaos, horrors and trauma of the lost First World War and its
aftermath had shaken many absolute truths and certainties of the nineteenth century.
Heidegger captured the spirit of the Interbellum that left little room for absolute
truths beyond time and place. Philosophy could no longer find any foundation other
than the temporal existence in the historical here-and-now of the individual, the

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

144

Lourens de Vries

Dasein, an existential ontology that broke with nineteenth-century absolute metaphysical foundations of philosophy in an anti-idealistic and relativistic climate
(Gordon 2003). Van der Louw (2006, 5) and Gordon (2003) describe the links
between Buber, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: for example, in the emphasis on the
existential function of language, but also a shared focus on roots and etymology.
Gordon (2003, 266) discusses the translation decisions of Rosenzweig that he sees as
reflections of the philosophical climate of the German Interbellum such as an
existential ontology and anti-idealism.
Buber and Rosenzweig stood in Jewish theological traditions, and they combined
the heritage of nineteenth-century Germany with theological thoughts about the
unity [Einheit] of the Hebrew Scriptures, a rabbinic hermeneutic that connected
Hebrew roots, words and phrases in very different parts of the Hebrew Bible. The
Hebrew Bible was a unity, one Book (Die Schrift, Scripture, in the singular). They
saw this unity as a result of an Einheitsbewusstsein, awareness of unity (Buber
1964, 1113), or bibelstiftende Bewusstsein, Bible creating awareness (ibid. 1186),
that worked in Scripture itself before it was canonized (Schravesande, 2009, 262
263). One divine Voice spoke in all the Hebrew Scriptures. The problem was how to
connect disillusioned and sceptical modern Germans to this Voice in their concrete
individual existence here and now, in their Dasein. Buber firmly believed that the
ears of modern Germans, Jews or Christians, formed the connection to the Voice:
when Scripture was called out and read aloud to them, God would enter the
existence, the temporality of individuals, through their ears (van der Louw 2006, 4).
This notion of Gesprochenheit or oral-aural spoken Urwort dimension of Buber
and Rosenzweig must be seen against the background of the nineteenth- and early
twentieth-century ideological and philosophical climate sketched in the previous
paragraphs. Buber and Rosenzweig based their approach on the Romantic
nineteenth century notion that the Bible was essentially oral literature written
down (Fox 1995, x). The Voice breathes and speaks in this fundamentally oral
Hebrew Bible. Buber and Rosenzweig divided the Hebrew text in cola or breath
units, units that could be spoken in one Atemzug or one breath. These cola were
breath units and meaning units at the same time (Buber 1964, 11761177).
Colometric structuring distinguishes all translations in the tradition of Buber and
Rosenzweig; the cola are small units of text and at first sight colometric formatting
seems to fragment the translation. But thanks to the Einheitsbewusstsein [awareness
of unity] that worked in Scripture, intertextual webs of audible linkages were formed
between these breath units, by repetition of keywords and of roots, across the whole
canon (ibid., 1177). These Leitworte [leading words] form audible clues: the listener
hears the repetitions, reflects on their links and by doing so starts to experience unity
and connections, threads of meaning that bind the cola together throughout the
canon, in an audible unity of Scripture, a unity based on the one Voice. The listener
is drawn into an inner-Scriptural dialogic encounter of Leitworte, spoken to by the
Voice in his or her existence, then-and-there (de Vries 2012, 9192).
The Leitwort approach of Buber and Rosenzweig is much more than a literary
notion because it combines repetition as a literary device with theological aspects of
the unity of Scripture, and of the unity of canon and rabbinic reading traditions. But
philosophical themes of the Interbellum also resonate in the Leitwort approach (the
Leitworte speak existentially to the listeners), as well as Romantic themes of direct
experience (the Leitworte speak directly to the listener who thus experiences the

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

145

Voice) and general nineteenth-century etymological views of word meaning. It comes

as no surprise then that the Leitworte became the cornerstone of the BuberRosenzweig tradition in Bible translation, in theory and in translation practices that
tried to capture the orality of the Bible. Consider the translation of the Hebrew
consonant root in Leviticus 1:2. Buber and Rosenzweig created new German
words (Nahung = near-ing; darnahen = to near there) to reflect the deep meaning
(Tiefsinn) of the repeated root near and translated: Ein Mensch, wenn er von
euch IHM eine Nahung darnaht3 (de Vries, 2014). Recent Bible translations in the
tradition of Buber and Rosenzweig reflect these views of the orality of the Bible in
their translation practices, to varying degrees. For example, Fox (1995) also
translates at root level in this passage of Leviticus 1:2, to make the repetition of
the root audible in the English version: When (one) among you brings near a
near-offering for YHWH.
The popular Dutch translation by Oussoren (2004), called the Naarden Bible,
pays tribute to Bubers perspective on orality in its preface and applies the Leitwort
strategy consistently in the translation of both the Hebrew Bible and the Greek New
Testament, also at root and stem level. The same is true of the French Bible
translation by Chouraqi (1974).
The difference between moderate followers of Buber and Rosenzweig such as
Everett Fox in the USA and more hardcore practitioners of these views such as
Oussoren in The Netherlands and Chouraqi in France is that moderate followers
tend to use the Leitwort translation strategy within smaller, literary units of the
biblical texts, and then only when there is clear evidence for writer-intended
conscious use of root or word repetition. But more hardcore followers emphasize
the audible unity of the whole Bible and accordingly apply Leitwort strategies across
books, at the level of the Bible as a whole, and with a much higher frequency.
Colometric division of the text (Bubers Atemzug or breath unit) and audible
allusions in Hebrew names are found in all post-war Bible translations that practice
Bubers perspective on orality. For example, Everett Fox translates the name
yaaqov, Jacob, in Genesis 25:26 as Heelholder, to capture the sound similarity
in Hebrew between aqev, heel, and the name yaaqov.
The second perspective: Universalist dichotomies
The first perspective on orality and Bible translation, with Gesprochenheit as central
notion, had its ideological roots in Europe, especially in nineteenth-century Germany
and had most of its impact in the world of Bible translation rather than in other
fields of translation.4 The second perspective on orality has its roots in three
academic disciplines (linguistics, anthropology and classical philology) in Europe
and America. It lacks the strong connections with theology and philosophy of
Bubers construction of orality and for a while the second perspective seemed to
express an academic consensus on the nature of orality. The well-written and
influential book Orality and Literacy by Ong (1982) summarized this consensus just
before it would be shattered by new findings in linguistics, biblical scholarship and
anthropology. Precisely because of its less obvious connections with theology and
ideology and its strong links to academic disciplines such as linguistics, the second
perspective had a far wider impact than the first. In fact, many of the present uses of
terms such as oral culture, oral style and oral syntax in translation studies,

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

146

Lourens de Vries

cultural studies, biblical scholarship and other fields of the humanities are still
informed by the second perspective.
Two elements are central to that mid-twentieth-century consensus on the nature
of orality. First, an almost impenetrable barrier was erected between oral communication and written communication, in the words of Carr (2005, 6): Past studies of
the oral and the written have been plagued by a frequent tendency to juxtapose
orality and memory with written textuality. Orality and literacy were understood as
two separate, contrasting worlds. This dichotomous thinking, the Great Divide of
orality and literacy, was so strong that counterexamples did not break the paradigm;
rather, this led to the recognition of mixed forms that were placed on an oral
written continuum that maintained the basic opposition between the oral and the
written.
The second element was an essentialist and universalist dichotomy that ascribed
a universal set of contrastive properties to orality and literacy. Oral syntax was
supposed to be simple, mostly paratactic, coordinative and basically juxtaposing
chunks of information, without much syntactic integration. Written syntax was
highly integrated, with embedding and recursion and complex syntax. Oral discourse
was concrete, context-bound, formulaic and repetitive, involving the listener,
synthetic rather than analytic. Written discourse was abstract, distanced, analytic,
non-redundant, non-formulaic, lacking mnemonic devices needed in oral cultures to
memorize oral long-duration texts. Oral cultures were pre-logic whereas writing had
introduced logic and abstract reasoning.
Where did all these properties ascribed to orality and literacy of the second
perspective come from?5
Syntactic attributes came from the linguistic debate about oral and written
discourse in English (de Vries 2003, 397). Linguists like Chafe linked oral
communication with parataxis, a lack of syntactic integration and reliance on
context to infer semantic relations, in contrast with the high degree of explicit
syntactic integration in written styles. Chafe and Danielewicz (1987, 103) attributed
this difference in the degree of syntactic integration to processing constraints: In
other words, there is a strong tendency for casual speakers to produce simple
sequences of coordinated clauses, avoiding the more elaborate interclausal relations
found in writing. Elaborate syntax evidently requires more processing effort than
speakers ordinarily devote to it. Although Chafe based his argument on informal,
casual speech (without claiming to generalize over all oral genres, let alone over
languages other than English), parataxis became associated with orality in general
(de Vries 2003, 399).
Cognitive attributes ascribed to orality and literacy in the second perspective
originated in anthropology (de Vries 2003, 398): for example, cognitive dichotomies
of pre-logical versus logical cultures (Lvy-Bruhl 1926), or cultures with thought
processes tied to the concrete versus those that can abstract from concrete
circumstances (Lvi-Strauss 1966). In the work of Goody (1977) and Olson (1994),
such old cognitive dichotomies resurface as cognitive properties of oral and literate
societies. Olson (ibid.) emphasizes that written language is decontextualized
when compared to speech. Speakers expect their listeners to infer information by
combining utterance and context. Writers do not share an immediate context of
utterance with their readers and accordingly cannot rely on contextual implications
to the degree that speakers can. Olson (ibid.) connects this explicitness and

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

147

autonomy of writing with the emergence of analytical and critical thinking, a

cognitive development that was less likely to take place in the contextualized, more
implicit communication of primary oral cultures. The second element in Olsons
view is the written text as a fixed object which the reader can compare to other texts,
interpret, summarize and so on. Such operations on written texts as fixed objects
would supposedly stimulate the distinction between text and interpretation, and
create a different metalanguage consciousness, leading to grammars, lexicons and,
ultimately, to the development of logic (de Vries 2003, 398).
Stylistic and literary attributes of orality and literacy of the second perspective
originated in the philological debate on the oral nature and origin of texts from
antiquity, as we find in the work of Parry (1928) and Lord (1960) on Homer (de
Vries 2003, 399). Parry noticed the frequent use of epithets, formulas, standard
themes and other formulaic elements in the metrical epics of Homer and attributed
that formulaic nature to the orality of such texts. Performing artists produced their
oral texts by drawing from a store of fixed formulas, standard themes and epithets
that helped them, together with rhythm, metre and assonance, as mnemonic devices
to memorize those traditions and perform them orally from memory.
Ong (1982) brought the notion of additive parataxis from the linguistic debate,
the context-bound concreteness from the anthropological debate, and the formulaic,
repetitive, mnemonic elements from the philological debate together in an accessible,
coherent, but highly dichotomous picture of orality that influenced many Bible
translators, especially in missionary and evangelizing contexts. After the Second
World War hundreds of missionary Bible translators from Europe and the USA
became active in minority languages in remote corners of the world, and they found
themselves very often in what they considered to be oral contexts, with oral
languages and oral cultures. Their views of orality were shaped by the Great
Divide of the oral and written dimensions of the second perspective and they
interpreted what they saw through that lens. When I was a translation consultant in
Indonesian West Papua in the 1980s and 1990s, I met Bible translators who tried to
oralize their translations, to adjust the translation to what they saw as the oral
mode of communication of their audiences (de Vries 2008). In practice, this often
meant frequent use of topic markers, the use of extra-clausal thematic phrases that
were not syntactically integrated in the following clause, forms of repetition and
recapitulation (e.g. tail-head linkages) and very long clause chains, strings of
syntactically very simple clauses.
The problem with that strategy was that the oralized translations became more
difficult to read, and to read aloud to listening audiences (de Vries 2008, 308). Renck
(1990, 9697) gives interesting data from the Yagaria area of Papua New Guinea.
The New Testament has been translated into two dialects of Yagaria, in the Move
dialect and the Kami-Kuluka dialect. Renck (ibid.) gives Mark 15:21 in both
translations. The Kami-Kuluka version uses cohesive markers (and recapitulative
tail-head linkage) as in oral Yagaria narrative genres: it has 17 cohesive markers in
three sentences which are connected by tail-head linkage. The Move version does not
use those devices in this fragment. Renck (ibid.) writes that the Kami-Kuluka
version is harder to read than the Move version because of the high frequency of
cohesive markers and other oral features. Notice that these were efforts in the
1970s and 1980s to adjust written translations to oral environments of interior New
Guinea, not to produce audio versions.

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

148

Lourens de Vries

When oralizing strategies did not really improve the effective communication
of the Gospel through these written missionary translations, a logical next step
within a dichotomous paradigm was to conclude that written Bible translations
could not work in predominantly oral environments, and this explains the impact of
so called storying approaches in the missionary communication of the Gospel. The
content of the Bible is translated into a chronologically ordered series of oral stories
that are recorded and played to audiences. Kalkman (2010) described the strong and
explicit links between the second perspective, especially as popularized by Ong
(1982), and the Chronological Bible Storying approach in missiology and Bible
translation as proposed by Brown (2004) and Franklin (2008). A key assumption in
these missiological approaches is that communication in oral cultures privileges
narratives. Abstract notions in non-narrative types of discourse for example, many
passages in the Letter to the Romans should be transformed into concrete and nonanalytic narratives.
Obviously, these audio versions of Bible stories work better than written
translations in getting basic biblical stories across in environments with low levels
of literacy. They are relatively effective because they continue a long and effective
tradition in the history of Christian missions: missionaries who transformed what
they perceived as the central content of the Bible into stories that they told to
listening audiences. These missionaries did not consider their oral Bible stories as
something that could replace a written translation of the Bible, as a sacred text with
authority in the community of the young Church. The same is true of young
Churches themselves: audio cassettes or DVDs with Bible stories are not perceived as
sacred base texts that speak with authority to their communities.
The third perspective: Local oralwritten interfaces
Independent developments in linguistics, anthropology, ancient studies and biblical
scholarship towards the end of the last century and in the first decade of this century
led to the breakdown of the paradigm of the second perspective. But these
developments also stimulated the emergence of new approaches to the relationships
between oral and written forms of communication: for example, in biblical or
ancient media criticism (Carr 2005; Rodriquez 2014), linguistics (Biber 1988; Besnier
1995), and anthropology (Scribner and Cole 1981; Foley 1997).6
Computers and statistical big data research changed linguistics and stylistics in
the last two decades of the previous century. One of the great breakthroughs was the
work of Douglas Biber (1988), who studied 20 properties associated with oral and
written language in a digital corpus of texts (both oral and written). He found no
absolute differences between written and oral texts. Whether a given text for
example, a shopping list, a sermon or a love song scored high for a certain property
could not be predicted on the basis of whether that discourse was oral or written.
Bibers work dealt a blow to the whole idea of a style continuum with typically
oral and typically written extremes. That notion was replaced by genredetermined configurations of stylistic characteristics. This does not make the
medium (oral or writing) irrelevant but rather underscores that it is only one feature
of a genre. Whether a genre of texts is oral or written is far less important for its
stylistic and linguistics properties than the combined impact of other aspects of its
genre. A shopping list is a written genre but it has most of the properties ascribed to

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

149

orality: it is paratactic in syntax, concrete, context-bound. The properties associated

with orality and literacy turned out to be not predictably distributed over the oral
and written genres represented in the corpus (de Vries 2003, 398). Bibers work on
English was replicated and confirmed for non-western languages by Besnier (1995),
working with a corpus from the Polynesian language of Nukalaelae. Stylistically,
personal letters form one cluster with conversations on Nukalaelae whereas written
sermons cluster with political speeches and radio broadcasts. The genre of personal
letters is determined by the cultural context of Nukalaelae in which kinship and
exchange relations are crucial.
I have earlier discussed data from primary oral languages of interior New
Guinea in communities where writing was completely unknown (de Vries 2003).
These data did not show the properties that the second perspective would predict: for
example, relative lack of syntactic integration or prominence of formulaic-repetitive
styles in long-duration texts. There are well-documented oral languages in New
Guinea that have subordination as the most frequent, unmarked way of clause
combining: for example, Yimas of Papua New Guinea. According to Foley (1991,
497), Yimas is a language that contrasts with many other Papuan languages in
making less extensive use of clause chaining . The most common type of clause
linkage in Yimas involves nominalization, both finite and non-finite.
Empirical studies on primary oral languages that is, languages spoken by
people who did not have literacy practices in any form or any (contact) language
showed rich oral traditions and various genres of oral literature but these longduration texts did not show verbatim or semi-verbatim performance of these oral
texts; rather, non-verbatim memorization and performance, with the important
exception of ancestral (spirit) names and ancestral genealogies, were found (de Vries
2012, 9495). Crucially, the mnemonic poetic prose style attributed to orality did
not have a special prominence in the oral literatures of primary oral communities (de
Vries 2003; van Enk and de Vries 1997) and this makes sense when communities
have no written reference point for their long-duration texts, in cultural conditions
where the intentions, the content, of the texts is the focus of the tradition and not the
wording (de Vries 2012, 83).
The mnemonic formulaic-repetitive style associated in the Lord-Parry tradition
with oral literatures turned out to be not typical of primary oral societies but rather
were found in societies that have a non-print technology of (re)producing written
texts, with scribal traditions and with a hybrid oralwritten interface in which semiverbatim memorization of written long-duration texts is the key feature: for example,
in ancient biblical worlds or in the ancient civilizations of Asia (de Vries 2012, 73). In
these conditions written texts are designed for easy memorization and oral recitation,
and that is why they have the mnemonic poetic prose style. The written texts
function very much like a score for a musician who performs a piece of classical
music: as a written background reference for a piece that primarily exists in the
memory of the performer (Carr 2005).
The anthropological debate on universal cognitive dichotomies of oral and
literate cultures also lost its relevance (de Vries 2003, 398). Relativistic theoretical
developments left little room for universal, ahistorical dichotomies of oral cultures
versus literate cultures. Empirical research in cognitive linguistics and anthropology
on the cognitive effects of the introduction of writing did not find universal effects
but a variety of local cognitive effects. Indeed, the effects of writing turned out to

150

Lourens de Vries

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

differ in crucial ways in literate cultures, and this supported the idea of different local
literacies (see, for example, Scribner and Cole 1981). As for the relationship between
logic and writing, highly abstract logic and codification of rules for logical reasoning
emerged in oral religious contexts to establish rules for doctrinal discussions: for
example, in the Buddhist schools of Tibet (Foley 1997, 419).
Perhaps the most radical shift away from the second perspective occurred in the
fields of classics and biblical scholarship. Two elements were fundamental in that
paradigm shift: the emphasis on the interdependence and interaction of oral and
written forms of communication and the emphasis on the local nature of that
interaction. These two elements come together in the notion of local oralwritten
interfaces to which we now turn.
Local oralwritten interfaces in antiquity
To present the new insights into orality and literacy in the field of ancient studies I
will summarize findings by David Carr (2005) in his book Writing on the Tablet of
the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature, a brilliant application of the new
orality-literacy paradigm on biblical literatures that shows how local oralwritten
interfaces in ancient worlds help explain the origin, transmission, nature and
performance of Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek Scriptures.7 For Carr (ibid.) the key
element in the transmission of long-duration texts in antiquity was the transmission
from mind to mind in a process of indoctrination/education/enculturation of an elite
minority of literati (6). The traditional texts were written on the tablet of the heart
(127) and the goal was to plant the values and ideals of the ancient texts in those
hearts along with the words. Thus, the minds stood at the centre of the often
discussed oral-written interface (6).
Written copies of texts were not designed for instant reading off a page, certainly
not for silent reading,8 but rather stood as a permanent reference point for an
ongoing process of largely oral recitation (Carr 2005, 4) based on memorization.
This explains many striking aspects of ancient manuscripts: for example, the absence
of word and/or sentence separation, leaving out vowels or sometimes giving only the
first word of a verse in full, with just the first letter of each succeeding word of that
verse and other forms of ancient stenographics (5). We can only understand these
characteristics of manuscripts in the context of a specific type of local oralwritten
interface. Only when people were already very familiar with a text, on the basis of
memorization, could they read it: reading was a kind of recognition. The written
copy of long-duration texts, if at all present at the performance scene, functioned as
a musical score does for a musician who already knows the piece (4). This analogy
with a musical score is helpful to grasp the relationship between the written and oral
dimension: they are interconnected aspects of the performative condition, linked via
memorization practices.
Manuscripts that in their visual form assume this type of oral-written hybrid also
occur in traditional cultures in other parts of the world (de Vries 2012, 73). The
Makassarese of Sulawesi, Indonesia, wrote their long-duration texts on leaves of the
Lontar palm. These Lontar manuscripts not only have no word spaces, but each
syllable is represented by just the first consonant-vowel, deleting any consonant(s)
that close the syllable (Evans 2010, 132). Cumming writes that only by knowing the
subject of a sentence can it be read. According to some Makassarese, the written

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

151

script only becomes Makassarese when it is spoken aloud (2002, xii). The skills to
perform texts in societies with these hybrid oralwritten interfaces is limited to an
elite minority who have the long-duration texts written on the tablets of their hearts
during a prolonged period of training.
The central memorization aspect of ancient oralwritten interfaces is the key to
other important features of ancient long-duration texts. For example, the link with
music: music, singing and chanting formed mnemonic aids to the memorization of
these orally performed written traditions (Carr 2005, 9496). Stylistic features such as
inclusio, chiasmus, chain words, and other repetitive structures like parallelism,
interpreted under the second perspective as oral residues in written texts of earlier
purely oral traditions, may be reinterpreted as writing strategies designed to facilitate
the memorization of the written text, to inscribe it more easily on the tablet of the
heart, and to facilitate the oral performance of written texts by the mouth and lips in
recitation. Carr writes in relation to Greek oralwritten interfaces: poetic and
formulaic elements often pointed to by the oral-traditional school might be
characteristics of written Greek epic that evolved to support its oral transmission
within early Greek society (ibid., 105). The frequent use of acrostics in ancient longduration texts is a good example of a writing strategy aimed at memorizing and
reciting the sequence of passages (73, 125).
Local oralwritten interfaces and printed Bibles of early modern Europe
Technological and material changes stand at the heart of changing dynamics in
localwritten interfaces, and the materiality of the carriers of (translated) texts
crucially shapes forms and functions of translations (Littau 2011).9 The invention of
print dramatically changed localwritten interfaces in early modern Europe, and
nowhere does this become more visible than in the Bible translations of early modern
Europe.
The invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1440 led to a whole new oralwritten
interface. By 1500, printing presses were all over Europe, and millions of volumes
had been distributed. Written texts entered the lives of countless individuals who
read those books individually, in the privacy of their homes. Compared to the very
small numbers of people who could read and write in ancient scribal cultures, early
modern times saw a sharp increase of literacy rates, although nowhere near the
literacy rates in modern, advanced societies. Mass production of Bibles led to
individual reading of the Scriptures from a private copy. Memorization of longduration texts became rare, and the primary mode of existence of long-duration texts
was no longer in the minds of an educated, literate elite. Early modern massproduced Bible translations of Europe show an explosion of visual paratextual
elements in the text, compared to the Bible translations of antiquity: word spacing,
indentation, pericopes with titles, chapters, verses, cross references to other texts in
Scriptures, annotations and explanations. These paratextual features were designed
to help individual readers to pick up the written text and start to read it, just read it
off the page, without the aid of the memorized text stored in the brain, without
assuming previous familiarity with the text prior to reading it, as in antiquity
(de Vries 2012, 79). The pages of early modern Bible translations such as the Dutch
Statenvertaling (1637) show an amazing system of paratextual links. Verses of
Scripture are linked to other verses in different books and to theological reflections

152

Lourens de Vries

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

in the marginal notes. We have no direct proof of the effectiveness of these

paratextual helps but we know they were in high demand. The nota marginalia of the
Dutch Statenvertaling, its central paratextual feature, were translated into English to
satisfy the demand among Protestants to be able to read and understand the Bible
without the help and mediation of clergy or Church.
Concluding remarks
Notions of orality have played an intriguing role in the history of modern Bible
translation, at all levels, from the way the biblical sources were understood as
essentially oral to oralizing translation strategies and perceptions of audiences as
oral in grammar, culture, style and cognition. To bring some order in the rich
intellectual history of orality I distinguished three perspectives on orality and Bible
translation, chronologically ordered from the nineteenth century to the early twentyfirst century. The distinction of three perspectives on orality and Bible translation,
although hopefully useful in an overview article like this, does not begin to do justice
to many translators and works on orality and translation that do not fit this mould.
The first perspective on orality, of Buber and Rosenzweig, attracted translators
and biblical scholars interested in the oral otherness of the Hebrew Scriptures. But
the otherness of the Hebrew Bible, or any other text, is never a self-evident notion.
To be identified and captured in translation, otherness needs to be theorized,
constructed; this construction of otherness takes place in domestic terms and
frameworks, and this is the irony of foreignizing translations (de Vries, 2014). Buber
and Rosenzweig constructed the oral otherness of the Hebrew Scriptures in the
terms, notions and ideologies of philosophies and ideologies that they had absorbed
when educated as philosophers in Germany. Contemporary critics of Buber and
Rosenzweig had a much sharper eye for this German layer of domestic inscription
than later critics, after the Second World War, who tended to stress the Jewishness of
Buber and Rosenzweig, and the Hebraicity of their translation, but ignored their
roots in German philosophies and ideologies of language, culture and translation.
An example of a contemporary critic sensitive to that German ideological side of
Buber and Rosenzweig was Kracauer ([1926] 1963, 180), who used the term vlkische
Romantik, an expression translated by Maranho as racial Romanticism, to
characterize the work of Buber and Rosenzweig (Maranho 2003, 77; van der Louw
2006, 15).
This first perspective on orality had much less appeal for most missionary Bible
translators who left Europe and the USA in great numbers after the Second World
War to work in remote corners of the world, often with an evangelical American or
European background. They were driven by a Protestant message-and-meaning
perspicuity hermeneutics. The Bible was seen as a clear message from God in
Hebrew and Greek that He wanted to be communicated as clearly as possible to all
humans, to each in his or her own tongue. The exoticizing emphasis on Hebrew
orality as part of a wider focus on Hebrew otherness and alterity of the first
perspective did not fit their missionary, communicative skopos.
This does not mean that they did not notice or appreciate these Hebrew features.
But rendering these features with the translation strategies of the Buber-Rosenzweig
tradition (root concordance, colometric divisions, rare and highly infrequent words,
difficult neologisms) did not have a high priority, given the missionary purpose.

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

153

Missionary translators did sometimes try to render the literary features focused on in
the first perspective such as keyword repetition, sound effects or inclusio, by
employing literary strategies of host communities with similar literary effects.
Wendland (2011) is an example of such an approach that he calls literary functional
equivalence.
Whereas the first perspective, of Buber and Rosenzweig, highlighted the orality
of biblical source texts as an aspect of their otherness, the second perspective
highlighted the orality of target cultures, as a form of otherness that Bible
translations should take into account in order to successfully communicate with such
oral audiences. Unfortunately, in portraying the orality of minority communities
in the developing world as paratactic (that is, without complex syntax), concrete
and context-bound, formulaic-repetitive, the second perspective had very little
basis in empirical study of such communities, and came dangerously close to
academic recycling of old stereotypes of primitive peoples as lacking abstract and
logical thinking, with oral languages that supposedly lacked complex syntax and
with simple, repetitive, coordinative forms of discourse (de Vries 2003).
Findings from anthropological linguistics, cognitive anthropology and especially
the fields of ancient studies and biblical scholarship gave way, towards the turn of
the millennium, to a third perspective on orality and literacy practices as historically
situated, driven by local technologies and material conditions, local social practices
of speaking and writing that can best be understood from the point of view of their
interaction and points of contact. Key to this new approach is the historical
situatedness of the interaction of orality and literacy practices. This means that we
cannot generalize over the local oralwritten interfaces in which the Hebrew sacred
texts, the Septuagint or the writings of the New Testament functioned. Performance
conditions, material culture, writing technology, the place of oral traditions; they all
differed crucially in these three traditions. To give an example of a localwritten
interface, this article focused on the Hebrew Bible, following Carr (2005), who
describes the place of scrolls, literacy, oral performance and memorization in ancient
Israel in the comparative contexts of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and Greece. We
lack such a comprehensive study of the Septuagint and the New Testament from the
perspective of biblical media criticism. Further research of the Septuagint and the
New Testament writings is needed to better understand the way in which oral and
written dimensions interacted in the origin, performance and transmission of these
traditions.
Notes
1. This section relies heavily on de Vries (2012, 8793; 2014).
2. To use a characteristic phrase of Schleiermacher (1838, 277), quoted by Venuti (2008, 85),
who also gives the translation by Lefevere (1977), bent towards a foreign likeness.
3. This sentence exemplifies the very peculiar form of German that Buber and Rosenzweig
used, often ungrammatical and with neologisms very difficult to translate into English. A
rather literal rendering would be: A person, when he from among you brings-near to HIM
a near-ing.
4. This section relies heavily on de Vries (2003).
5. I rely on Foley (1997, 417434) for the origin of the properties ascribed to orality in the
second perspective.
6. This section relies heavily on de Vries (2012).
7. This section is based on de Vries (2012, 7179).

154

Lourens de Vries

8. This does not mean silent reading was unknown; it was known but not the default way to
perform a text. See Carr (2005, 4) for the emergence of silent reading and more visually
oriented reader-friendly teaching texts for use in early education in the Hellenistic period
when literacy became more widespread.
9. This section is based on de Vries (2012, 7982).

Note on contributor
Lourens de Vries is professor of general linguistics in the Faculty of Humanities and professor
of Bible Translation in the Faculty of Theology at VU University in Amsterdam. His research
interests include the anthropological and descriptive linguistics of New Guinea, linguistic
aspects of Bible translation processes, the application of skopos approaches to Bible
translation and the history of Bible translation, especially in Asian contexts.

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

References
Askani, H. 1997. Das Problem der bersetzung-dargestellt an Franz Rosenzweig: die Methoden
und Prinzipien der Rosenzweigschen und Buber-Rosenzweigenschen bersetzungen. Tbingen: Mohr.
Besnier, Nicholas. 1995. Literacy, Emotion and Authority. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation Across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Botterweck, Johannes, and Helmer Ringgren (eds). 1980. Theological Dictionary of the Old
Testament. Vol. 4. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
Brown, Rick. 2004. Communicating Gods Message in an Oral Culture. International
Journal of Frontier Missions 21 (3): 122128.
Buber, Martin. 1964. Schriften zur Bibel. Vol. 2 of Werke. Munich: Kosel.
Buber, Martin, and Franz Rosenzweig. 1997. Die Schrift. Gtersloh: Gtersloher Verlagshaus.
Carr, David M. 2005. Writing on the Tablet of the Heart: Origins of Scripture and Literature.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chafe, Wallace L., and J. Danielewicz. 1987. Properties of Spoken and Written Language.
In Comprehending Oral and Written Language, edited by R. Horowitz and S. J. Samuels,
83113. New York: Academic Press.
Chouraqi, A. 1974. La Bible. Paris: Descle de Brouwer.
Cumming, W. 2002. Making Blood White: Historical Transformations in Early Modern
Makassar. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
de Vries, Lourens. 2003. New Guinea Communities Without Writing and Views of Primary
Orality. Anthropos 98: 397405.
de Vries, Lourens. 2008. Appendix: Bible Translation and Primary Orality. In Contextual
Frames of Reference in Translation. A Coursebook for Bible Translators and Teachers, Ernst
Wendland, 297310. Manchester: St Jerome.
de Vries, Lourens. 2012. Local Oral-Written Interfaces and the Nature, Transmission,
Performance and Translation of Biblical Texts. In Translating Scripture for Sound and
Performance, edited by James Maxey and Ernst Wendland, 6897. Eugene: Wipf and Stock.
de Vries, Lourens. 2014. The Romantic Turn in Bible Translation. Translation 3: 123149.
Evans, Nicholas. 2010. Dying Words: Endangered Languages and What They Have To Tell Us.
Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Foley, William A. 1991. The Yimas language of New Guinea. Stanford: Stanford University
Press.
Foley, William A. 1997. Anthropological Linguistics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Fox, Everett. 1995. The Five Books of Moses: A New Translation with Introduction,
Commentary and Notes. New York: Schocken.
Franklin, K. J. 2008. Loosen your Tongue: An Introduction to Storytelling. Dallas: SIL
International.

Downloaded by [179.176.132.213] at 11:57 24 June 2015

Translation Studies

155

Goody, J. 1977. The Domestication of the Savage Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Gordon, Eli P. 2003. Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy.
Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kalkman, Gino. 2010. Het gebruik van Chronological Bible Storying in Bijbelcommunicatieprocessen in primair orale culturen. MA thesis, Vrije Universiteit.
Kracauer, S. [1926] 1963. Die Bibel auf Deutsch. Zur bersetzung von Martin Buber und
Franz Rosenzweig. In Das Ornament der Masse. Essays, 173186. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.
Lefevere A. 1977. Translating Literature: The German tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig.
Assen: Van Gorcum.
Lvi-Strauss, Claude. 1966. The Savage Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Lvy-Brhl, Lucien. 1926. How Natives Think. New York: Knopf.
Littau, Karin. 2011. First Steps towards a Media History of Translation. Translation Studies
4 (3): 261281.
Lord, Albert. 1960. The Singer of Tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Maranho, Tullio. 2003. The Politics of Translation and the Anthropological Nation of the
Ethnography of South America. In Tullio Maranho and Bernhard Streck (eds),
Translation and Ethnography: The Anthropological Challenge of Intercultural Understanding,
6484. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Olson, D. 1994. The World on Paper: The Conceptual and Cognitive Implications of Writing
and Reading. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ong, Walter. 1982. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen.
Oussoren, P. 2004. De Naardense Bijbel. Vught: Skandalon en Plantijn.
Parry, Milman. 1928. LEpithte traditionelle dans Homre. Paris: Socit ditrice Les Belles
Lettres.
Reichert, K. 1996. It Is Time: The Buber-Rosenzweig Translation in Context. In The
Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between, edited by Sanford Budick and
Wolfgang Iser, 169186. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Renck, Gnther. 1990. Contextualization of Christianity and Christianization of Language: A
Case Study from the Highlands of Papua-New Guinea. Erlangen: Verlag der Ev. Lutheran
Mission.
Rodriquez, R. 2014. Oral Tradition and the New Testament: A Guide for the Perplexed.
London: Bloomsbury.
Schleiermacher, Fr. F. 1838. Smtliche Werke. Section 3, Vol. 2. Berlin: G. Reimer.
Schmidt, Gerda G. 1995. Martin Bubers Formative Years: From German Culture to Jewish
Renewal, 18971909. Alabama: University of Alabama Press.
Schravesande, Hans. 2009. Jichud. Eenheid in het werk van Martin Buber. Zoetermeer:
Boekencentrum Uitgevers.
Scribner, S., and M. Cole. 1981. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
van der Louw, Theo. 2006. Vertalen volgens de Duitse romantiek (Schleiermacher, Buber) en
soorten letterlijkheid. Kerk en Theologie 57 (1): 5979.
van Enk, Gerrit J., and Lourens de Vries. 1997. The Korowai of Irian Jaya: Their Language in
its Cultural Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Venuti, Lawrence. 2008. The Translators Invisibility: A History of Translation. 2nd ed. New
York: Routledge.
Wendland, Ernst. 2011. LiFE-style Translating: A Workbook for Bible Translators. 2nd ed.
Dallas: SIL International.